Construction, transport, retail may create most jobs: Assocham

Amid the controversy on jobless growth in India, industry chamber Assocham on Sunday cited its report holding that sectors like real estate, retail, wellness and transport and logistics may create most jobs in the near future.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham)-Thought Arbitrage Research Institute joint report also said India's information technology and IT-enabled services (ITeS) sector may add at best one million jobs in the next five years.

"The IT and ITeS (sector), which is under pressure at present, in any case, was to expand at a lesser pace in job creation. On the employment base of 3.3 million in 2013, the much-touted sector had an incremental human resource requirement of 2.2 million by 2022, of which about one million have been added in the last 3-4 years," it said.

"Thus, as a country which requires at least 15-20 million jobs a year, we need to look quite broader and at those areas which expand not only in the export market but also within the country," Assocham Secretary General D.S Rawat said in a statement.

According to the report, building, construction and real estate, including infrastructure, sector would require 31.1 million incremental jobs.

"The sector has been the worst-hit because of multiple factors including high level debts and non-performing assets, delays in delivery of housing projects, and environmental and regulatory hurdles. We need to get these issues out of the way in a manner that it becomes a robust engine of job creation and economic growth," Rawat said.

Besides, organised retail can create incremental level of at least 10-12 million new jobs in the next five years, while textiles and clothing can also be a potential area of job creation, the report added.

The central government think-tank the Niti Aayog on Friday trashed unemployment surveys as unreliable and said it has set up a task force to produce authoritative annual nationwide employment data based on household surveys.

"We don't have an existing survey from which we can get the numbers (of unemployed). In the process, the debate on jobs has happened in a vacuum," Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Arvind Panagariya told reporters, while referring to surveys done by the Labour Bureau in 2015 which showed that only 135,000 jobs were added by certain sectors that year.

"There is serious problem with these surveys in eight sectors of the economy, where the total workforce covered is three crore, out of a countrywide workforce of around 47 crore," he said.

"Even these three crore come from 11 states. It is a non-random survey sample from which you're trying to arrive at the population numbers, which you cannot. One can't extrapolate from the sample to the population," he added.